Gifts are ‘part of good business relations’, Charbonneau inquiry told

Monique Muise, THE GAZETTE02.24.2013

“(Gifts) are not something that’s new, and not something that’s limited to the city of Montreal ... it’s a tolerated practice,” former head of Montreal's public works depertment, Robert Marcil, testifies before the Charbonneau Commission on Monday.

Prying information out of alleged mob middleman Nicolo Milioto proved one of the commission’s toughest challenges to date.

MONTREAL – The former city bureaucrat who once oversaw Montreal’s entire public works department says he had no idea his employees were fixing prices on municipal contracts and accepting bribes for their efforts.

Robert Marcil took the stand at the Charbonneau Commission late Monday morning and spent the rest of the day denying that he had any knowledge whatsoever of the graft occurring under his nose at the city. Last fall, retired city engineer Gilles Surprenant admitted that, while working for Marcil in the 2000s, he pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bribes from construction bosses in exchange for artificially inflating the city’s cost estimates — allowing the construction companies to bid much higher than the actual cost of the work.

“We did not leave Mr. Surprenant to his own devices,” Marcil testified Monday, attempting to convince Justice France Charbonneau that his former employee could not have influenced cost estimates to any great extent. “Mr. Surprenant was monitored. Mr. Surprenant did not have responsibility for all projects.”

Marcil said he finds it hard to believe that cost estimates were being falsely inflated by as much as 30 per cent under his watch, but added that the city “knew it wasn’t very successful” when it came to producing accurate assessments. It needed professional estimators, he testified, but could not afford to hire them.

While Marcil said he was shocked to discover that Surprenant was accepting cash, the fact that his staff regularly received gifts like bottles of wine, dinners and hockey tickets from construction companies hardly came as a surprise.

In fact, he said he accepted similar presents.

“(Gifts) are not something that’s new, and not something that’s limited to the city of Montreal ... it’s a tolerated practice,” Marcil explained. “I think it was part of good business relations. I think it’s important to put things in perspective.”

The former public servant also played down the significance of providing construction companies with a general idea of what contracts might be coming down the pipe in a given year. Marcil’s staff would never be permitted to hand them precise cost estimates or dates when contracts would go to tender, he testified, but painting a picture of the city’s overall plan seemed harmless enough.

“It wasn’t something hidden,” he said.

One thing Marcil did oppose when he took over the public works department in the mid-2000s, however, was the practice of handing out lists of interested bidders on a project to whoever asked for them. He acknowledged that this would have allowed companies to determine who else might be competing for the work and potentially collude to ‘fix’ the winner.

Marcil resigned from his job in 2009 after it was revealed he had travelled to Italy with local construction boss Giuseppe Borsellino. Borsellino confirmed during his own testimony before the commission this month that he treated Marcil to the luxury getaway.

Earlier Monday, Charbonneau Commission investigator Guy Desrosiers presented a series of internal reports dating back to the late 1990s that showed the city was not only made aware of the problems within its public works department, but provided with clear recommendations to help correct the situation. The reports were never destined to be seen by the public.

Among the findings in the 2006 report: almost 60 per cent of Montreal’s public works contracts in 2005 had been awarded to just four companies. The names of those companies — Simard Beaudry, Infrabec, Pavages C.S.F./Construction Mirabeau and Sintra Inc. — were not included in the formal report, Desrosiers said, but they were included in an attached letter addressed to then-city manager Claude Léger. He is expected to testify at the commission later this week.

By 2009, the private firms hired to produce the reports had come to one unavoidable conclusion: the city of Montreal was not getting value for money when it came to public projects. In fact, data indicated that sewer and aqueduct projects in Montreal were costing as much as 85.5 per cent more than same projects in other Quebec cities.

Some of that eye-popping gap could be explained by the unique challenges faced by construction companies in Montreal — such as traffic and age of infrastructure — but a significant portion (nearly two-thirds) was due to elements that could have been better controlled. If the city made some changes to how it tendered and drew up contracts and cracked down on the monopoly on public works contracts that had been established by a few local contractors, the report concluded, it could bring the prices down significantly.

Desrosiers said it appears officials decided not to act on those recommendations.